Software applications may be rolled out and deployed across an organization such as a company, university, hospital, etc., either hosted on a server of the organization or installed on individual computers belonging to users within the organization. Updates for such applications are often restricted to critical updates such as security patches, whilst other features in newer versions are not automatically updated, even though they may be able to serve the user better. In some cases, the software applications may have already been purchased under an enterprise agreement, but are not yet deployed on each of the individual computing devices. Information Technology (IT) managers, who are in charge of the application roll-out, are often unclear of the particular benefits they will get in upgrading the software used in their respective organization.
Automated software updates relieve the users within an organization (e.g. employees and IT managers) from having to manually check for and install new updates on a regular basis. However, the users may not be made aware of new features that are already included with the automated updates, and therefore may not be able to make full use of the new features. Even if a list of new features is provided with each automated update, the users are still not likely to relate the features to their day to day work.
When an organisation rolls out new software, or when using existing software, the users within the organization (e.g. employees or IT staff) may only know of certain key features that are prominently displayed in a user interface or that are well promoted. Inevitably, some features that may be useful may never get used, unless users take an active role in exploring and learning the new software (e.g. an employee has to read through user manuals to discover whether a particular feature is present).
As a result, the full capacity of existing, updated, or new software is often not utilised. Moreover, companywide roll-out of newer software that would improve productivity is often postponed.
To mitigate this problem, some software providers provide extensive customer support, e.g. call centres, to contact users within an organization (e.g. employees or IT staff) in order to understand their needs, and based thereon to suggest previously unused features that may be useful on an individual basis.
Alternatively, frequently asked questions or a library of common scenarios built on past customer feedback may be provided in a database, which allows an employee or an IT manager to relate to other users' experience and therefrom how the software can be used in a similar way.